1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the planning apparatuses or planning-systems relating to the maintenance (including repair and replacement) of the parts used in gas turbines or the like.
2. Prior Art
The lives of the parts used in gas turbines or the like, especially, the lives of high-temperature parts, are determined, with the deterioration characteristics of the part materials taken into consideration, as the time over which the parts can withstand the operation of the gas turbines (that is to say, service life in the number of hours), and to operate the gas turbines over the time exceeding the lives of their parts, these parts need to be replaced with new ones. Also, parts of the types that suffer particularly significant deterioration require maintenance at fixed hours of operation, until the parts have reached the respective lives.
In thermal plants, for example, a scheduled shutdown period for periodic inspection and other maintenance purposes is provided for each fixed operating period in order to maintain the normality of the gas turbines, and the parts constituting various equipment are to be checked during these periods. During the checks, each part whose life has been reached or whose service life in the maintenance period also requires maintenance such as repair or replacement.
Up to now, rotation plans have been set up by manual operations and manual calculation when such a rotation scheme is to be adopted for operation. However, as described above, since the maintenance of the high-temperature parts used in gas turbines or the like needs to be planned considering the maintenance required at fixed periods, manual planning has been a task very high in workload.
Whether the parts are to be repaired or replaced can be judged from the current information relating to the parts of the gas turbines and from actual result data relating to the corresponding plant, and the art for enabling this is disclosed in Japanese Application Patent Laid-Open Publication No. Hei 10-196403.